GREEN JACKET’S LORE LOADED WITH COLOR

AUGUSTA, Ga. 
Walk into a party with a green jacket these days and you’d get a lot of funny looks. It’s not a fashionable color. Green is the shade of tractors and gardening utensils, isn’t it? Coveted, green usually is not.

But you put the right logo on it and associate it with the most recognized golf tournament in the world, and it becomes special. Ask Adam Scott, who looked like a million bucks in it on Sunday night as the latest Masters champion.

Fittingly, the jacket is made of Australian wool, which hasn’t seemed to help the Aussies before Scott, since it took them 77 years to win one.

The existence of the green jacket came into being in 1937 when Augusta National members wanted to become more identifiable to the guests at the Masters, though they certainly weren’t enthused about wearing the hot wool on sweltering Southern days. (It was also said that the jackets indicated who would be picking up the check for meals.)

Interestingly, winners of the Masters didn’t begin getting a green jacket until 1949, when Sam Snead became the first.

A Cincinnati company makes the green jackets. It last ordered the green fabric in 1990, getting a 500-yard roll. That’s enough to make 200 jackets.

Champions’ names are said to be stitched in the green jacket, but there is a funny story about Jack Nicklaus. No player has won more Masters than the six Nicklaus earned, but for years he didn’t have his own green jacket.

When Nicklaus won his first Masters in 1963, outgoing champion Arnold Palmer draped him in a 46 long jacket. As Nicklaus recalled last week, “I could have used it for an overcoat. I was a 43 regular.”

The next year, Nicklaus returned and they still didn’t have a jacket for him. So they let him borrow the 43 regular of former New York Governor Tom Dewey. And for many years Nicklaus wore that jacket. “They kept giving me Tom Dewey’s coat when I won the Masters,” Nicklaus said.

Finally, in 1998, when they were dedicating a fountain to Nickalus at Augusta, the legend told former chairman Jack Stephens about never having his own jacket. Stephens was floored.

“So anyway,” Nicklaus said, “I went home that weekend, came back, and there was a note in the locker, ‘You will go to the pro shop and get your green jacket.’ So now I have a green jacket.”